Tuesday, September 01, 2015

Thoughts About Hurricane Katrina While It Was Happening

by Neil H. Buchanan

Almost ten years ago today, sitting in shock in front of my computer screen as I tried to make sense of reports of what was happening in New Orleans, I posted on a now-defunct academic blog some very raw reactions to the unfolding catastrophe. As the world thinks anew about the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, I have decided to reprint my post, "Tell Us Again," without further comment.

Tell
us again that government is the problem, that things will be perfect if
we just shrink our governments down to nothing and allow the wonders of
private enterprise to solve all of our problems.As
we look in horror at the grisly results of under-funded and ignored
public works projects, we need to hear again the song that lulled us to
sleep for decades, telling us that we will all be better off if we
vilify and ridicule all government programs.Surveying
the terrible human cost of a monumental failure to plan for an
emergency that was not only predictable but predicted, we need to hear
again that the invisible hand is the best planner and that government
planning will inevitably make matters worse.Tell us again that poverty does not matter.We
loved hearing that people living on welfare really had it pretty good,
that they were driving around in Cadillacs, that the poverty line had
been manipulated by liberal professors to inflate the amount of money
going to undeserving people who refused to get a decent job.When we worried that maybe some people really could not live on minimum wage
incomes (even supplemented by what remained of the safety net), we
loved being told that poverty does not matter because over time some
people move out of poverty and into higher income groups.Sure,
at any given time, there might be poor people, but we were happy to
hear that they need not be stuck there for a terribly long time.The
people who died last week because they were too poor to leave the path
of disaster might have had a shot at middle class status one day.Or the kids that they might have raised might have had a shot.Maybe.Let us hear that one again.It sounded so good.

Tell
us again that discussing race is a divisive ploy, that the civil rights
gains of the sixties ended any real need to address lingering issues of
racial disadvantage in our country.We
long for the voices that told us how racial discrimination was a thing
of the past, that political concerns about race were cynical attempts to
create guilty consciences in innocent hearts and minds, that there is
no longer institutionalized racism, that nominally color-blind laws mean
that we really live in a color-blind society.Seeing
the faces of the most stricken victims of the disaster, we must be
reminded that racism has been defeated. We need to hear that story
again.

Tell us again that sending ill-equipped national guard troops to die abroad had no downside at home.Tell us again that public spending is a waste.Tell
us again what a great idea it is to have guns in the hands of millions
of people, so that they will be safe from their government.Tell us again that the federal government is not needed because local and state governments should handle their own affairs.Tell us again that one state’s problems are of no concern to people in other states.Tell us again that we can have anything we want and not have to pay for it.Tell us again that the most important policy is always, always to cut taxes for rich people.

Tell
us again that we were smart to have a nonstop tax-cutting,
safety-net-shredding party, even while we ignored warning after warning
that the costs of our irresponsibility would be incalculable.Looking
helplessly on as the death count begins, as the damage is assessed, as
the most shameless politicians continue to pretend that nothing has
changed, we need to hear one more time that all of this really was a
great idea.

2 comments:

There was a very good episode of This American Life this week on the Lower 9th Ward ten years later showing how many of these problems persist even today: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/565/lower-9-10

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